Gillian Tett is an assistant editor of the Financial Times and oversees the global coverage of the financial markets. In 2007 she was awarded the Wincott prize, the premier British award for financial journalism, for her capital markets coverage. She was named British Business Journalist of the Year in 2008. (on Frontline Club, London).

… She joined the FT in 1993 and worked in the former Soviet Union and Europe, and in the economics team. In 1997 she was posted to Tokyo where she became the bureau chief, before returning in 2003 to become deputy head of the Lex column. She is the author of Saving the Sun; How Wall Street mavericks shook up Japan’s financial system and made billions (Harper Collins and Random House). Gillian Tett has a PhD in social anthropology from Cambridge University, based on research conducted in the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s. She speaks French, Russian, moderate Japanese and Persian … (full text).

She says: ““People who come from a background of arts and humanities and social studies tend to think that money and the City is boring and somehow dirty” … and: “But if you don’t look at how money goes round the world you don’t actually understand the world at all. When you try and join up the dots about how money can be linked to politics, can be linked to culture, then it’s electrifying” … (on Press Gazette, Oct. 31, 2008).

Gillian Tett was trained as a social anthropologist but became a journalist while doing fieldwork in Soviet Central Asia during the communist period in Russia. Since that time she has risen through the ranks of the Financial Times, holding positions on its economics desk before becoming the bureau chief in Japan. She now lives in London. (on Random House Group).

The banking world ignored Gillian Tett when she predicted the credit crisis two years ago. Laura Barton hears how her training in social anthropology alerted her to the danger … (full text, October 31 2008 – see also: Corrections and clarifications, Oct. 31, 2008).

She writes: … This was the idea that the 21st-century financial system and global economy had become so stable and sophisticated that dramatic swings in activity had seemingly disappeared. Volatility, in other words, was supposed to be an issue of the past … (full text, Oct. 27, n2008).

She writes also: … “Every one was looking at the City and talking about M&A [mergers and acquisitions] and equity markets, and all the traditional high-glamour, high-status parts of the City. I got into this corner of the market because I passionately believed there was a revolution happening that had been almost entirely ignored. And I got really excited about trying to actually illustrate what was happening. Not that anyone particularly wanted to listen. You could see everyone’s eyes glazing over … But my team, not just me, we very much warned of the dangers. Though I don’t think we expected the full scale of the disaster that’s unfolded” … (full text).

… The second more important parallel is that up until the autumn of 1997, many Western investors and those dealing with Japanese banks did not believe the banks’ published accounts and knew something was awry. Faith in the Japanese ‘convoy system’, the ad hoc arrangement whereby healthier banks intervene to help or absorb insolvent institutions meant that no preventive measures were taken. The convoy system, however, was shown up as being far from impregnable and some banks were allowed to go under. Tett thought she would never see this repeated but is now grappling with a sense of déjà vu with bad loans yet again undermining major banks in the UK and USA … (full text).

For more than a decade, Japan’s dismal economy – which has bounced from deflationary collapse to fitful recovery and back to collapse – has been the biggest obstacle to economic growth. Why has the world’s second largest economy been unable to save itself? Why has a country, whose financial might in the 1980s was the most feared force on the globe, become the sick man of the world economy? Saving the Sun answers these questions and more in the riveting and remarkable story of Long Term Credit Bank, one of the world’s most respected financial institutions, and its attempts to transform itself into a Western-style bank and reconcile the cultural gulf that still exists between Japan and the international banking community … (the book: Saving the Sun, Shinsei and the Battle for Japan’s Future, by Gillian Tett).

Explaining Last Week’s Credit Seize Up: If the Financial Times’ Gillian Tett were hit by a bus, I’d be in a lot of trouble. With all due respect to her colleagues, she is the best source of financial news: Today, in Structured investment vehicles’ role in crisis, Tett probes what went wrong in the credit markets last week. As others have pointed out, the problem was that the commercial paper market, a short-term (typically under 90 day) market for corporate IOUs dried up. As these IOUs mature, they are often rolled (i.e., paid out of the proceeds of new IOUs) rather than repaid. Since commercial paper issuers are high quality creditors, this usually isn’t a problem … (full text).

… The editorial page cheered everybody on with a call to arms: “Nationalize to save the free market.” Columnist Gillian Tett said, “there is now, I believe, real light at the end of the tunnel.” Then to page two, where one headline says “Turmoil brings out best in Europe,” and another says “French brawn and U. K. brains lead way.” Deeper into the paper we have a mostly positive story about how the “Hand of state returns to tiller of U. K. banking,” and another headline on Ms. Tett’s column says “Policymakers save the world in the final reel” … (full text, Oct. 15, 2008).